If you've ever watched someone make cotton candy being made at the carnival, you know it requires an incredibly fast motor to spin the machine and create the floss-like fibers of the candy. As it turns out, a standard hard drive spins even faster, and serves as a perfect base for your own DIY cotton candy machine.

This impressive hack isn't for the faint of heart, but it looks like a lot of fun, and should teach you a thing or two about how this mysterious substance is made. Basically you'll be using bike spokes to attach a metal tin to a spinning hard drive platter, then adding a heating element below the tin to liquefy the sugar inside. When the hard drive gets up to speed, the centrifugal force ejects tiny strands of the sugar into a plastic bowl you place along the periphery, which you can scoop up to create a fluffy ball of cotton candy. For a complete walkthrough, be sure to hit up the source link.